Nougat

@Nougat@kbin.social

I am trying to focus on posting source documents, as opposed to someone else's reporting on source documents.

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Nougat,

Today is a good day to Fry.

Nougat,

When you get in bed and the moon is shining like a spotlight on your face.

Nougat,

Yes, they do.

Source: I was an eight year old.

Nougat,

There's a big difference. Zero sane adults actually believe in Santa.

The Santa tradition, I think, teaches something very important to kids: that they are the ones who need to figure out what's true and what's not, even when that disagrees with what trusted authority figures say. Religion doesn't do that, since there's never a time when the curtain is pulled back on it.

Nougat,

My point being that there are great numbers of adults people who still literally believe in the organized religion of their choice. Those people do not "pull back the curtain" for their children when they come of age; they continue to propagate the religion as truth.

The Texas Superconducting Super Collider under construction, 1990s. (lemmy.world)

Excerpt: The Texas Superconducting Super Collider would have dwarfed CERN’s LHC, according to reports. It was designed as an enormous underground ring complex situated close to Waxahachie and had it been allowed to go forward, would have been considered the most energetic particle accelerator in the world. The project’s...

Nougat,

This is all from recollection, but --

The other site in the running was adjacent to Fermilab in Batavia, IL. It would have cost much less to build there, because it would have used the existing ring as a pre-accelerator, and the human capital necessary was already in the vicinity. Not only was it going to be more costly to construct in Texas, it would be more costly to maintain as well; I recall something about the insect population in Texas being much more detrimental to the concrete.

This was all being planned and organized in the 1980s, and I think Bush being Vice President (and then President through 92) may have had something to do with it going to Texas.

Nougat,

One of my kids started crocheting like ... six weeks ago? She's been making little animals, keychains, hats, and is selling them at craft shows to fund a school choir trip in the spring. I'm absolutely amazed.

@snaptastic Please let me know if this comment meets your relevancy standards.

Nougat,

I bet you're fun at parties.

Nougat, (edited )

Somebody mentioned Voodoo cards, I had a bit of information that related to that. That's how discussions work; they kind of go where they go.

But I'll make absolutely sure to get your permission before I comment again.

Proton Mail CEO Calls New Address Verification Feature 'Blockchain in a Very Pure Form' (tech.slashdot.org)

Proton Mail, the leading privacy-focused email service, is making its first foray into blockchain technology with Key Transparency, which will allow users to verify email addresses. From a report: In an interview with Fortune, CEO and founder Andy Yen made clear that although the new feature uses blockchain, the key technology...

Nougat,

Proton rolled out the beta version of Key Transparency on their own private blockchain, meaning it's not run by a decentralized series of validators, as with Bitcoin or Ethereum. Yen said Proton might move the feature to a public blockchain after the current version serves as a proof of concept.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/blockchain-not-crypto-proton-mail-120000573.html

Because the Proton blockchain is currently private, the keys they are currently adding could easily be affected by a man in the middle attack.

No. That's not how that works. Just because a blockchain is "private" doesn't make it suddenly changeable, and it doesn't mean there's a unsafely small number of nodes. People commonly get invited to participate in beta testing; that's kind of how software development works.

And there would be no way to invalidate those keys for any of the affected users, ...

Remember when I said:

As long as there is an appropriate method for adding a legitimate entry to the chain, incorrectly entered data can be handled by appending corrected data on to the chain, and marking the error as such.

That hasn't become untrue in the last hour.

Nougat,

Well, if there's not, then the whole thing would never work at all.

Nougat,

This part:

As long as there is an appropriate method for adding a legitimate entry to the chain, ...

Nougat,

"Hey, I'm making a cake, I think you'll like to have a piece when it's done!"

NO WAY AM I EATING THAT RAW BATTER WITH UNCOOKED EGGS IN IT YOU'RE EVIL

This is why you're not one of the beta testers.

Nougat,

Context matters:

Proton rolled out the beta version of Key Transparency on their own private blockchain, meaning it's not run by a decentralized series of validators, as with Bitcoin or Ethereum. Yen said Proton might move the feature to a public blockchain after the current version serves as a proof of concept.

It's not rewriting history. We're talking about validation of public keys. The exact same information can be added to a public non-beta chain, to satisfy the concerns about security that would come from maintaining a previously private beta chain into production.

Nougat,

It's. In. Beta. Of course it's not being offered to the general public yet. It's likely that there are very many beta nodes, in order to test scalability. When it's out of beta, you drop the beta chain and start a new one.

deleted_by_author

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    Nougat,

    Fuck em, leave it up.

    Nougat,

    2 centuries forever

    Nougat,

    10W30 motor oil will be thicker (30) when it is hot. Cooling it in the fridge will not make it anywhere near cold enough to thicken up from its thin cold-temperature weight (10).

    Nougat,

    Remember when automatic doors were activated by a switch under a rubber mat?

    Nougat,

    … safety against steep hills …

    That’s what the barbed wire is for, then, right?

    Nougat, (edited )

    @holycrap - I absolutely apologize; I intended no mockery of you personally, but I can totally see how my response could have been received that way. It's all too easy to forget that I'm interacting with real human people sometimes, even if I try really hard to remember.

    Thank you, @Shelena, for bringing this to my attention. Your responses have been necessarily corrective and gently condsiderate at the same time.

    Nougat,

    Everyone has easy access to everything they need.

    Nougat,

    This is a historically notable letter.

    Nougat,

    I'll go and look at how my recent comments and submissions are doing, but that's more to get a sense of how my outlook aligns with the outlook of the general readership. And when the alignment is off, I'll look at other comments to see what is getting traction.

    By this process, its become clear to me that the outlook of Reddit The Userbase (as opposed to Reddit The Company) has become much younger in recent years. All too often, when my positions are heavily downvoted, neighboring comments expressing more popular (populist?) positions make me think, "Yeah, I used to think that ... thirty plus years ago."

    Nougat,

    Well, this comment chain started with:

    That’s where tech companies start to get a justification to fiddle with speech.

    Which implies that companies need a "justification," which further implies that companies "fiddling with speech" needs to be "justified," as though "unjustified fiddling with speech by companies" is, or should be, disallowed.

    Later, you said:

    Free speech usually means that you have freedom to express yourself, ...

    That might be colloquially accurate, but it's misleading in the context of private companies acting as platforms for speech, in the US (I know I have beat that drum plenty, but it's necessary).

    Infringement of freedoms is met with legal consequences. Since private entities are not oblligated to be a platform for any speech, whether that's a forum on the internet or other people's signs in your front yard, there are no legal consequences when those private entities curb the speech in the space they provide for speech. The discussions around this situation generally carry a subtext of "something should be done about this," and because of the conflation of colloquial vs legal "free speech," it's easy for that "something" to feel like "companies shouldn't be able to do that," with legal consequences.

    Who is talking about it being illegal?

    People rightly recognize that there is a problem with the diminishing ability for people to express themselves, and conversations about that usually misidentify the problem as being with the operators of private spaces where so much speech is today exercised. Any solution which grants and protects individual rights is necessarily a legal solution. So, while maybe nobody is saying the words "It should be illegal for companies to curb speech on the platforms they operate," the discussion is about a legal remedy.

    I was trying to describe that the problem is more likely the degradation of the public commons. The relative absence of public spaces in which speech can be effectively transmitted drives people's speech to private spaces, and those private spaces come with much greater limitations on speech. While I don't have a specific solution to offer for that problem, I have to think it must include creating or reinvigorating public commons.

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